The place where Megus dwells

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Welcome to my new blog! For those who don’t know me, let me introduce myself: I’m Roman, a software developer and musician from Russia.

I haven’t been blogging for a very long time. My old blog was at LiveJournal and was in Russian. Why am I creating a new blog? Well, first of all, I’ve finally decided to update my website and thought it might be a good idea to use WordPress for it. Next, I’ve left my previous job recently and it’s time for changes in my life. Starting a new blog is a good change, isn’t it? The last but not least — I believe I can tell something interesting to my visitors. Why is this blog in English? I just want to target global audience and it’s a good practice for my English skills.

I don’t have a single theme that I will cover in my posts because I have various interests. Let me tell you a bit about them.

Like I said in the beginning, I’m a software developer. I have more than 15 years of professional experience. My current main area of expertise is iOS application development. I like mobile platforms because I’ve started programming on 8-bit computer ZX Spectrum and I learned how to work with limited resources. Though I must admit that the current smartphones are far from being limited. You will definitely see some articles about iOS development. Besides to my job I also work on my own software projects and I will post news about them.

My main hobby is music. I’m a self taught music composer, performer and sound engineer. My music background starts with 8-bit computers again. I was quite active on ZX Spectrum demoscene and composed a lot of chiptune music. I still love chiptune and continue to compose music that incorporates its elements. My main instrument is a guitar but I also play number of ethnic musical instruments which I collect.

As a result of my love to music and programming I became interested in the math and algorithms used to process and analyze audio. Until last year it was only a theoretical knowledge but then I’ve finally applied it to practice and developed a core audio analysis code for iOS app Guitarability. I don’t want to stop and plan to continue practical experiments in this area and write about them in the blog.

My most recent interest is artificial intelligence and machine learning. I’ve had a course on neural networks in the university but it was very basic so I have a lot to learn. I’m really excited by all the recent achievements in this area.

I’m also interested in user experience (UX) design and usability. As a programmer I wasn’t that frustrated by terrible user interfaces until I read “The inmates are running the asylum” by Alan Cooper. It was an eye-opener for me. I started to notice more and more usability problems everywhere and to joke that there are “non-humanoid aliens who hate humankind” and all these awful interfaces are a part of their plan to conquer Earth. You will probably see posts under tag “aliens” in the future.

Well, I think that’s it. Follow my blog, I will do my best to make it interesting!